I did not have the patience to wait for the Windows Update so I downloaded an ISO and started to upgrade and on my Surface 3 Pro it was a matter of about 30 minutes and I had a working new version! It was a really smooth upgrade process!

I have been quite busy after Ignite but wanted to share with you what sessions I attended and the recordings for those so you can watch them. There were some better quality sessions and I will try to guide you to them. My interest was of course Hyper-V, Nanoserver, Docker, Azure, Automation, System Center, Storage….

In the afternoon I went to my MVP-friend and Hyper-V colleague Aidan Finn´s “Hidden treasures in Hyper-V 2012 R2” https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2015/BRK3506 which is a keeper as it gives you some hints on what to think about to make your hosts run better and that is with the version available for production today!

Wednesday

After a great party by Veeam I was a bit late in to the sessions on the morning but got a nice breakfast and chat with a Microsoft guy, after that I went to the Nanoserver session with Jeffrey Snover, always a pleasure to listen to a guy that can do presentations https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2015/BRK2461

After that It was lunchtime and then I went to watch my friend Fredrik Nilsson´s Community Theater Session “Getting started with Chef”

One year passes so fast and today was the day when it was my renewal date for the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional award. This is my second time that I get the award!

I have been working quite hard in the communities during the year with live presentations, webcasts, blog posts etc and was hoping that it was enough. In the afternoon I got a bit nervous and started thinking that maybe there was someone else that have made a bit more contributions and took my place but,

At the magic time 04:29 PM CET I got the longing mail :

I am in good company with about 50 other Hyper-V MVP´s and learn stuff every day from my friends and expertise-colleagues and 2015 will ROCK, so see you around and most certainly at Ignite in Chicago in May!

keep following my blog and twitter and I will try to keep up and post information and help when I encounter problems or smart solutions that you can benefit from 🙂

So you are an IT Pro or maybe an CIO or CTO and have been sleeping under your desk the latest years or so? But the IT Operations departments are under a lot of stress these days coping in being able to deliver the services to the business in the pace that they demand! Do you recognize this? For example your development division request 50 VM´s and wanted them yesterday, Your response is that come back in a week or two….

Many IT departments are seeing their internal customers such as Dev or Business going outside of the organisation and buying their services directly from Azure or another public cloud provider delivered instantly and that also cheaper than you could produce internally..

Here the Hybrid way of thinking becomes important and why, well you will not be able to compete with all the services that the public cloud can give you in a cheaper and more reliable way so IT Operations of tomorrow will utilize the public cloud as their own and be able to use it for their needs where their private cloud lacks functionality or capacity and in that way respond to the requests from the departments.

Giving the users an self service portal where they can order and see the cost of their engagements is an important part of this and when you implement this you have to have automation as a key part because the users want things to happen when they press the build button!

Taking Microsofts Azure data centers as an example, they have automated enormously and that from the physical layer all the way into the virtual machines and networks. How does this automation gain you with your environment and becoming more agile and not just run around putting out fires but being able to address the needs of the company IT challenges today and also tomorrow!

Some say that we are in the second machine age and that the IT will have to change big time. Just look at the public cloud Company’s and their services, if they would have done things in a traditional way they would have to charge xx times the amount the charge for their services and also be xx more manpower on the data centers to cope with the day to day operation.

In the latest year Microsoft have released several automation solutions that have been developed and gives you the tools for this must-have automation platform. First of is the Service Management Automation (SMA) which is a robust orchestration engine based on PowerShell workflows and this has also been released as Azure Automation. Secondly we have Microsofts investment in Desired State Configuration and here this also utilize PowerShell. The DSC have some development left but it is so powerful and really large web services utilize this today and keeping their massive services compliant and up to date! DSC can be used for provisioning different things including third party software solutions and for example, Microsoft Azure offers different web services (jomla, wordpress etc) deployed in an automated way probably with some DSC technology behind the curtains.

Of course this gigantic automation project will not be done over a night and will cost quite a bit of money in initial investment but the winning and surviving IT Department is the one successful in their automation processes!

9 years ago I started an onboarding automation process and on that time I had VB script to work with but that manual labor every time a new employee was hired was painful and so boring and already at that time I found the will and inspiration to learn techniques to automate. Still today there are several processes in companies that are perfect candidates for automation but for some reason still being done manually…

I have now in a couple of weeks been testing a Nokia Lumia 930 phone and it is soon time to return it. Importantly that need to be said here is that I have been using iPhones since 2008 and also for a short while I used an Android phone and quite quickly went back to the iPhone.

The iPhone and Apple has been very successful with their devices since the first came out. The amount of apps available for IOS is huge and companies and governments also have adapted and created usable apps for making the life of the user smooth.

The Windows Phone in it´s earlier versions have had its ups and downs and I have not seen it as a possible replacement before the version 8 of the OS and later..

Now as I have lived with the phone and tried to adapt I can really say that I like it.. the build quality is magnificent and the screen looks great, it is fast and I can manage my daily tasks, it is obvious that the development of the OS have got some attention and Microsoft have thought through how the phone should work and with the new features like for instance Cortana it is in the edge of Phone OS development..

Still I miss my banks app but they say that it is coming this year so when that one have arrived I can buy me self a beutiful Lumia 😉

Some of the apps I have installed:

Waze

SAS Scandinavian Airlines

Skype

Spotify

SVT Play

Swish

Yammer

Amazon Kindle

Easy Park

Facebook Beta

GoPro

Instagram Beta

Lync 2013

Netflix

Office Lens

PC Remote

Twitter

WinRunner

There are of course more apps that would make it into the cut and the development of new apps go blazing fast so just because your favorite app right now only exist for Android or IOS that will change in a near future. I think we will see a fast changing map now that Microsoft owns the phone division of NOKIA and can make the momentum for devices and solutions that would attract new users that most likely could have been stuck with an iPhone before..

So when you are going to change device next time, think twice and look at the Lumia phones!

I have been busy with vacation and taking care of the family the latest couple of weeks! But there is some news I want to share with you, Tomorrow I will work my last day at Lumagate and then a new adventure will start at my old employer Real Time Services.

My role will be Chief Technical Architect – Microsoft Solutions, within this I will be responsible for offerings and design with hybrid clouds based on Azure and all its features, Hyper-V and office 365. With the new functionality that Azure continuously delivers it will be exiting times ahead getting customers to utilise and see the benefits with an hybrid cloud environment.

Real Time Services is also in a new exciting phase with a recent merger with two other companies making a larger and broader company that will be able to be a better solution provider and also make a serious commitment on Microsoft Cloud OS. The other companies that is part of the merger are PMCG and Skypoint.

So I have in several posts described different ways on moving from one hypervisor to another with your VM´s. There are several different choices when it comes to the transitioning phase, some more automated than others.

But wait!! Yea I know the virtualization is Gods gift to the IT but it also carries some responsibilities. The technique gives you as the IT admin the possibility to run old legacy operating systems almost forever.

One big thing in the Move projects is to also take into account if the workload running can be upgraded within the OS, not just moved to another virtualization platform. Surely you do not want to describe on your CV that in your last employment you had Windows 2003 Servers as Domain Controllers for instance. Compare it with VHS, do you still watch movies and record stuff on the 80/90´s system?

First of all you can use the Microsoft Assessment and Planning toolkit to analyze what of your workloads can be upgraded ( I know, it does not look at your third party server applications that needs some brushing of and upgrading also)

When you have analyzed and got some workloads that can be migrated then check out this page on what tools and wizards you can use to actually smoothen the process for those windows roles and features running on your old and soon to be unsupported OS to an new version! As you can see below, Windows 2008 R2 is coming to the last date of mainstream support!

Yes I know that this often can be a quite burden on the IT department to carry out this kind of transformation projects and for several company-critical applications this can also become a serious cost that someone has to approve or maybe decide to decommission if they live outside of the support window!

So I have been a Apple fan for some while now and yesterday I was at a local electronic store and tested the Surface 2. This resulted in me coming home with an RT 😛

I really like the speed and the functionallity of this device.

Maybe I will start looking at the Pro as the RT has some limits but it is fast and I can take care of several of my daily tasks. Had loved if it was possible to run not just PowerShell but also the ISE. Found some suggestions to utilize Azure IaaS with a RDS desktop with the software and tools not available in the RT and maybe that would work 🙂

By the way, this post was also written on the device, will tomorrow change to the type keyboard instead ….